This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. I heard a bit about this when I attended a Columbia B-school event where a TLC rep spoke about some of the projects the TLC was working on. This was a specific request for a car design that could actually handle the kind of “get in get out” use that a NYC taxi goes through. It’s a fascinating thing to consider: NYC cabs are not really used like regular cars. They are just regular cars that are painted yellow and given a meter, but they aren’t equipped for efficiently tackling the basic needs of a taxi.

For example, the car ought to be small and maneuverable around the city. It also needs a lot of leg room. (The Crown Victoria is the large car of choice because it has tons of leg room and lasts well into the 100,000 mile range.)

A lot of people ask why the entire fleet isn’t converted to Priuses… the answer (according to taxi drivers/owners) is that a Prius apparently breaks down often and is very expensive to repair, and it’s much smaller inside (which is true) so passengers don’t like it as much. The issue is that neither the Prius nor the Crown Vic were built for NYC streets and 30-40 trips per day. When you’re getting in and out of a cab, seconds count (ever get stuck behind a cab as someone gets in or out?). Traffic depends on it.

I love a lot about this new cab design. First, the front passenger faces the back so they become part of the ride and not the oddball in the front seat. Second, there is clearly a push for accessibility not only for those in a wheelchair but also older folks who have a harder time just jumping into a cab and swinging the door shut in 2 seconds flat. Third, I’m a huge fan of the destination sign and number of available seats – that is a great feature that cannot come soon enough. And Fare/Share will support en route pickups in version 2. Fourth, the sunroof! The roof opens up so you can actually enjoy the NYC skyline like you’re in a limo during prom!

What struck me is that there is already a group ride rate structure for taxis from the airport to areas in Manhattan:

§1-71Group Rides.(a) [Group rides fare from LaGuardia Airport. Notwithstanding the rate of fare set forth in §1-70 (a) and (b), the fare for trips made pursuant to a group riding plan from LaGuardia Airport shall be as follows for each passenger:(1) for a trip to the East Side of Manhattan, east of Fifth Avenue, from 23rd Street to 96th Street: $7.50(2) for a tip to the West Side of Manhattan, west of Fifth Avenue, from 23rd Street to 96th Street: $8.50(3) for a trip to downtown Manhattan, south of 23rd Street: $9.50]

But now they are seeking to repeal this mysterious section that no one in NYC seems to even know exists. It appears the rates apply in situations that are described in 1-70, which I don’t have in front of me. In any case, the explanation for the proposed repeal is helpful to understand the direction the TLC is taking:

Statement of Basis and Purpose of Proposed RuleSince 1993, Taxi and Limousine Commission rules have permitted three different group ride fares from LaGuardia Airport to specified areas in Manhattan. However, these group rides are no longer used. The LaGuardia group rides were put in place at a time when there was a shortage of taxicabs at LaGuardia, which is no longer the case. Therefore, the TLC and the Port Authority agree there is no longer a need for this group ride rate.

The TLC is interested in studying, by means of a pilot program, whether a different group ride structure might attract more passenger interest. For instance, it may be that there are shortages of taxicabs at the airport at certain times of day, or at certain locations such as the Marine Air Terminal, where many commuters arrive on shuttle flights. Also, it may be that business travelers who are heading to similar destinations in the Manhattan Business District may be interested in a group ride program. The repeal of the existing unused group ride structure would be necessary to facilitate such future pilot programs.

Yup! We just heard this afternoon that we’ll have a 1 minute demo slot at next week’s NY Tech Meetup. This is huge news, as it will be largest NYTM ever and NYU will be filled with 850 NYC techies. It’s a perfect combination of elements to launch our much anticipated Fare/Share iPhone app.

Sure, we would have liked to have 5 minutes to really dig into the app and show off the bells and whistles, but hey, something is better than nothing. We’re going to craft a quick demo that shows just the couple of primary screens a rider will immediately encounter. We want to underscore how just a 2 second investment of time – a “check out” to a destination neighborhood – is all it takes. If you match with someone, awesome! If not, no harm done. The app is obviously really fun to use when there are matches available, so we’re hoping our iPhone launch will get riders excited, especially as they leave the NYTM event.

We submitted the app a few days ago and are keeping our fingers crossed it is accepted by the Apple gatekeepers shortly.

This will be my second time on stage. My first NYTM demo was for VocabSushi last July and it was a blast.

So be sure to buy a ticket now as this event is already selling out.

On Tuesday, June 8th, 850 of your fellow technologists will be at NYU Skirball Center for an extra special Meetup:Not only will this be our first event held at the beautiful NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the June Meetup

is slated to be the biggest event held during Internet Week — and the biggest NY Tech Meetup we’ve held to date! Wow

Well we made it through TechCrunch Disrupt. It was a very long couple of days but we had a great time. We must have pitched to 75+ people over a 12 hour period on our feet on Tuesday (when we had our table).

We got some awesome feedback from a lot of really smart people and even got to speak with some press and one or two investors. While Aaron was off getting lunch, I was interviewed on TechCrunch TV which was pretty exciting stuff.

You can watch pretty much all the talks and demos online. But there isn’t much about the startups that were outside in the hallway – and there were maybe 50 companies on Monday and another 50 on Tuesday. It was a pretty massive event.

We’ve got some pretty neat things in the pipeline that I’ll blog about soon.

Our first bit of press! A 2nd page piece in AMNY about Fare/Share with a photo of yours truly. We are pumped for TechCrunch DISRUPT this week and are gearing up for a long 3 days of demoing, pitching and networking (and occasionally eating).

This week has been a crazy whirlwind of productivity. It’s the week before we soft launch FareShare at TechCrunch disrupt and we’ve all been working overtime to make sure this is a great conference for us.

Things are totally different now. Here is a list of 10 things to do before a launch that we’ve had to tackle.

Get a logo — We did this through Crowdspring.com, a nifty website that lets you outsource your logo design. You basically explain the idea you have for the logo and you get back a time of actual logo designs from tons of designers. They guarantee something like 40 or 50 and the average logo project gets about 85. So that’s a lot to choose from. And then you pick what you like. We finalized the logo the middle of last week, selecting a pretty cool concept (that I had initially mocked up to help guide the process) from a Romanian designer.

T-Shirts — Once we had a logo, made a whole bunch of black and white T-shirts through Vistaprint.com. Having looked through some photos from the last TechCrunch conference, only a handful of people seemed to be wearing T-shirts with their logos (maybe there were a lot, but it’s hard to tell). It seems like an obvious way to be memorable amongst the other startups. The T-shirts arrived two days ago.

Business cards — This is a no-brainer but still something that needs to take place at least a week before the conference since, like in our case, you have to pay a rush fee to get it in fewer than seven days. We used PrintsMadeEasy.com which is where I had my VocabSushi business cards made last year. I love their website and the little monkey that jumps around (is that weird?). The business cards arrived yesterday afternoon.

Flyer cards — We need something to hand out to everybody who comes by our table whether or not they get a demo. So we made some really cool 2” x 4” diecut two-sided cards from PSprint.com. One side has a screenshot of the iPhone app while the other side has the logo and the high-level features. They arrived two days ago

The app itself — Duh! We’ve been working pretty much nonstop on tweaking and fixing the FareShare iPhone app over the last two months or so, but as we get closer to the conference, knowing that we need a really tight demo, I’ve been spending a lot of time hammering out all the little details to improve the app in a lot of subtle ways (and sometimes not-so-subtle ways… some of our fare calculations are still way way off!). One of the biggest hurdles that we are still facing is to get our app submitted and into the app store. Our hope was that the app would be available during the conference for attendees to use when they leave (and find each other to share cabs), but it looks like we’re just struggling to submit the app sometime next week and hope that it gets accepted by the following week.

The website — All this time we have been so focused on the iPhone app and the mobile web app that we never really turned much attention to a basic website! We had our developer set up a WordPress installation so that we could change the content and update a lot of parts of the website ourselves. Any time you’re about to get some press, even if you don’t have an app out or the product is in stealth mode, or whatever, you have to have a website that explains something and has a form so that visitors can enter their e-mail and be notified of the launch later on.

Produce a demo video — FareShare is a pretty fascinating concept because in order for it to work, two complete strangers need to physically meet somewhere and get in a cab together. So the demo video can’t be your typical screenshot slideshow of the app itself, since we are aiming for more of a cultural change where people become more at ease with sharing cabs. While the app is interesting to use, we decided that it’s far more compelling to show real people in real situations using FareShare. So we wrote a fun script that depicts Jack, a guy hanging out at a bar with some friends, and Samantha, a girl who is running late to get to her lady gaga concert. We thought the best way to get potential users on board was to show them situations and people with whom they could identify. We hired my friend Dustin’s production company to produce the video. We will probably see a rough cut of it later today.

Get some press — I guess it helps that I went to Columbia journalism school (‘04), but believe it or not most my friends are not journalists and the ones that are are not really involved in technology. So we had to hustle a bit and track down some New York City tech journos who might be interested in covering FareShare. One of the cool things about TechCrunch is that the participating startups can offer press passes to members of the press. So that makes the pitch e-mail just a little bit sweeter. Luckily, I did have one contact at AMNY that I had been e-mailing with about my MTA blog. On Monday morning, look out for a piece (with a photo of yours truly) in AMNY! I’ll blog about that separately.

Set up meetings and make contacts — FareShare is a pretty amazing app with a grand purpose: to help make transportation in New York City more efficient, cheaper, and faster. There are some really amazing organizations in the city with the goal of improving transit and reducing traffic. We met with a friend of mine, Charlie Komanoff (known for his congestion pricing model, and recently featured in Wired Magazine), to talk through numbers and figure out the market for cab sharing as well as what some of the benefits could be. He put us in touch with Open Plans, which is a wonderful nonprofit that does a lot of work with the city to help figure out better transportation options. We are also planning to meet with TLC next week.

Set up a timeline and plan ahead — We are trying our best not to go about this launch in a haphazard way. FareShare is going to depend crucially on a critical mass of users. If we don’t have a critical mass in a pretty short amount of time, most people will probably not want to use the app because it will generally come up empty with rides. So we planned a bit of a launch schedule. First, we will be getting press on Monday. Second, TechCrunch will generate a huge amount of buzz (hopefully), and we will speak with potential investors. Just yesterday, I did a demo with Brandon Diamond who helps run the NY Tech meetup group. Their next meetup will be on June 8, in a huge 850 person auditorium at NYU, right smack in the middle of Internet Week. So third, we’re hoping will be able to do a big demo at the meetup and this will be when our app hits the app store. All during Internet week we’re hoping to generate tons of buzz about FareShare, so we’ve been signing up for as many events as possible (since they all basically fill up the week of). When the app becomes available, that’s when will mass e-mail all the people who have signed up on the website to be informed when we officially launch, and our hope is that this rapid flood of new users will help us hit a critical mass in a more effective way than a gradual rise of early adopters.

There is always more to do: more people to meet, more tweaks to make, more practice for the demo. We’ll be working til Monday when the conference starts and continue through til the end of Internet Week. It’s going to be intense but this is what it takes to make FareShare happen.